Clients vs. customers – via Seth Godin

I start my day reading Seth Godin’s blog, every day, for maybe two years now. His posts are short and often they are obvious truths. But I read them long enough that they got me to fear less, deliver more, and think about marketing and my work in a new light.

Today’s post is called Clients vs. customers and it struck me how it describes what we do at Dulcian and how we are different from other software companies.

You need to choose.

Customers hear you say, “here, I made this,” and they buy or they don’t buy.

Clients say to you, “I need this,” and if you want to get paid, you make it.

The customer, ironically, doesn’t get something custom. The key distinction is who goes first, who gets to decide when it’s done.

At Dulcian we have clients and we build software to match the needs of our clients, We build our tools so that it will be easy to create and recreate the product we offer our clients, to each an individualized product – the system that we worked together to build. We do need the client’s input and feedback… lots of it. But what comes out fits our client and most of them appreciate that.

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